Trump’s Trial Delay Strategy is producing results even he didn’t expect
When former President Donald J. Trump was indicted for the first, a second, a third and a fourth last year, he and his legal team went through disbelief, anger and the recognition that he would have to face juries for much of 2024. as he campaigned to return to the White House.
But even as Mr. Trump turned the charges against him into a rallying cry for his supporters and tried to hijack courtrooms for his political ends, his lawyers looked for ways to delay the trials by using pretrial investigations to move the proceedings into a legal to bring about an impasse. .
It wasn’t even clear to them that the strategy would work. But they nonetheless threw all sorts of arguments at judges designed to push some or all of the trials past Election Day, while a victory for Mr. Trump would provide him with opportunities to delay judgment even further or wipe out the charges entirely.
The substantial success they have achieved came into clearer focus Wednesday, when the Supreme Court decided to uphold one of its long legal arguments: that presidents are virtually immune from prosecution for actions they take while in office.
The justices’ choice means that the federal trial of Trump on charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, originally scheduled to begin next week, now appears unlikely to begin before September.
The timing of a new case will improve slightly on Friday. Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s trial on federal charges of mishandling classified documents after he left office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, is likely to set a new start date for that procedure, which was originally scheduled to begin at the end of May.
Federal prosecutors and Mr. Trump’s lawyers have a deadline of Thursday to submit their requests for a new start date for the documents process.
The case in Georgia in which Mr Trump is accused of trying to undermine his 2020 election loss in that state is bogged down in pre-trial drama about the conduct of the prosecutor who filed the charges.
If things continue to get in Mr. Trump’s way, it is possible — though by no means certain — that he will go to trial in just one case before November, in Manhattan, where he is charged in connection with hush-money payments to a porn site . star in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.
Even the possibility that he may face just one or two trials this year represents a victory of sorts for Mr. Trump and his legal team. It also highlights the complexities of trying to prosecute a former president who is closing in on the 2024 Republican nomination and could very well take the oath of office again on January 20.
This is “what lawyers do all the time for clients with the right resources, and across the country there are just many more people paying attention to this particular defendant,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former U.S. attorney and FBI official.
But there’s still a lot of legal wrangling ahead, and the proceedings at the federal courthouse in Fort Pierce, Florida, on Friday, when Judge Cannon is likely to set a new trial date in the secret-documents case, underlines the legal and logistical complications.
Judge Cannon has already said she is inclined to make some “reasonable adjustments” to the timing of the trial. Several decisions made by Judge Cannon in recent months about the pace of the case have made it virtually impossible for the trial to begin as originally scheduled on May 20, and pretrial maneuvering by Mr. Trump’s legal team has shown how disputes over how to handle the highly sensitive material at the heart of the indictment can ruin the proceedings.
On Wednesday, Judge Cannon denied a highly unusual request by Trump’s lawyers to access a secret government file detailing a trove of classified evidence that prosecutors said was neither useful nor relevant to his defense.
Had Judge Cannon granted the request, legal experts said, it would have fallen far outside the normal procedures laid out in the Classified Information Procedures Act, the federal law that governs the use of classified material in public trials.
But even as he ruled against Trump, Judge Cannon seemed to suggest he was different from most criminal defendants. She did not fully agree with the position of Jack Smith, the special prosecutor, that the facts in the case did not justify “a departure from the normal process.”
“The court cannot speak with such confidence about this first-ever criminal prosecution of a former president of the United States — once the nation’s top classifying authority on many of the documents the special counsel is now trying to withhold from him,” wrote she.